


Strange Celebrations

by cofax



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Apocalypse, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-17
Updated: 2009-11-17
Packaged: 2017-10-03 05:23:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cofax/pseuds/cofax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>SG-1, some unpleasant weather, an alien city fifty-thousand lightyears from home, and a dozen or so uninvited Jaffa.  Oh, and (maybe) an apocalypse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strange Celebrations

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](http://community.livejournal.com/apocalypse_kree/profile)[**apocalypse_kree**](http://community.livejournal.com/apocalypse_kree/) 2007.

At mid-day, it was blindingly bright in Midian, even at street level in the canyons of the city. Kilroy, as the Colonel had named the planet's primary (it had no name on Sam's charts, being tucked on the far side of a nebula out of sight of Earth), was hotter and whiter than Sol; as a result most residents and travelers stayed off the streets for a long siesta each day.

Sam didn't have that option; she'd come through the gate mid-morning and wanted nothing more than to wash and collapse into bed. And she couldn't do that until she got home. Sidestepping around a puddle of mmala dung, she pushed her sunglasses back up her nose and looked up at the silver-brick building on the next corner. Her dry and cracking lips moved a little as she counted: the corner window on the seventh floor was closed. Which meant she was the first one back.

It didn't necessarily mean anything. They might have found some information, or had further to go. Sam herself had taken four days to return from the job, hitting six worlds in quick succession, going to ground in a snow cave for two days, and then swinging past the cache to swap out her gear before returning to Midian. If it had taken her that long, without any noticeable problems, she shouldn't be surprised the others were later. Daniel and the Colonel were legendary for finding trouble, after all.

Their rooms--Daniel called it a flat, of course--were spare and uncluttered, the high windows darkened against the hot sunlight. Sam could tell just by the smell that no one else was home: three Tau'ri and a Jaffa, none of them fully adjusted to this climate, really stank up the place. She shrugged out of her outer robe and hung it on a hook, tucked her pack under her side of the sleeping platform she shared with Daniel, and headed into the bath. Water, hot or cold, she didn't care--she would take on a Goa'uld barehanded if it meant she got a bath.

She'd bathed--the blood she washed off her arms had stained the wash-rag a murky brown--napped, and gone out into the cooler (but still hot) evening to buy food, when Teal'c and Daniel returned. Sam had a net bag on one arm, full of bread and the purple-striped fruits that tasted like a mango-grape explosion, and a bottle of something clear and deadly under the other, while she fumbled with the lock. The mechanism got sticky in the evenings, and you had to enter the code two or three times before it accepted your palm. So she was swearing under her breath and trying not to drop the liquor on the tacky hallway floor, when Teal'c's broad hand dropped on her shoulder. She yelped in surprise.

"Sam, it's just us!"

"Damn it, Daniel!" Sweaty and gross again already, Sam felt like she'd lost all the benefit of her bath. To be fair, Daniel and Teal'c--who had caught the bottle, good man--both looked wilted and filthy. The side of Daniel's face was swollen and bruising, from that hit he took from the merc in the airlock. When she got the door open, she stood back and let them enter first, shrugging at Daniel apologetically.

Teal'c gave her a grave nod, even his eyes looking a little sunken; Daniel walked right to the bed and toppled over onto it, not even taking off his pack. "God." His voice was muffled by the flat quilted pillow. "That... sucked."

Sam nudged Daniel until he rolled over, then went to work on his boots. The rest of them had gone for native dress, but Daniel refused to wear the sandals--he broke a toe on a dig once, and now wouldn't let his boots out of his sight. She tugged one off and dropped it on the floor, while Teal'c hung up his robe and carefully stowed his gear. "There's fruit in the bag there," Sam said, pointing with her chin.

Teal'c took the fruit into the kitchen alcove: Sam heard the swish of him sharpening a knife before using it. He was by far the best cook of them all, and they always ate better when Teal'c was around. Which wasn't as often as she would like: he was spending more and more time with Bra'tac and Rak'nor, making the rounds of Rebel Jaffa camps and sneaking into Goa'uld strongholds to foment revolution. Multi-tasking had survived the apocalypse. _Shut up, it's not the apocalypse. We don't know what happened._

The fall of Earth had slowed the Jaffa rebellion, but in no way stopped it. Daniel had guessed that within a generation the Goa'uld would lose most of their armies; the tipping point was fast approaching.

Daniel's left boot thunked heavily onto the floor, and Sam shifted around to sit next to him on the poorly-cushioned platform. "If you think I'm touching your socks, you've got another think coming," she said, but he didn't move. "Daniel?"

"He is very tired," said Teal'c, and offered her the bowl of sliced fruit. "We have not rested for over thirty-six hours."

The fruit was not quite ripe, but plenty juicy; Sam closed her eyes as the tart liquid ran down her throat. She swallowed, and asked around another bite: "What happened?"

"As O'Neill would say, 'the usual.' Keres' Jaffa saw the address we used, and it took several days to lose them. Also, there was someone near the gate when we went to the cache." He settled onto the floor, moving a little more stiffly than usual, and placed the bowl on the grey-green tiles between them.

"Who was it?"

"Merely some traders, Daniel Jackson thought, who took a wrong turn. They left, but we had to wait for some time in the trees."

Sam frowned, chewing her lip. They couldn't risk the cache; if someone found it SG-1 was screwed. That was the danger of stashing it on another planet, but they couldn't take the risk of staying nearby--too much of their equipment had naquadah and other elements in it that could be identified with a scan. And the Colonel had been obstinate on that point: they needed a bolt-hole where they couldn't be found, someplace safe to go to ground. Midian was it: away from the gear, away from the Alpha Site, away from any of their allies. Somewhere they wouldn't be expected.

The sun was dropping: light was filtering in through the windows and picking out scars and smudges on the red-brown wall. Between them, Sam and Teal'c ate the fruit, leaving only pale-green rinds in the bowl. Daniel's slow even breathing, punctuated by the occasional allergic snort, was the only sound in the room, while the hum of the city waking for the evening overlay everything else. "We need supplies," Sam said, finally, half-asleep again. She blinked and tried to sit up; somehow she'd ended up curled on her side next to Daniel. "I'm almost out of ammo, and we don't have any soap."

"I will obtain cash tomorrow," said Teal'c, and pushed her back onto the bed next to Daniel. "Sleep, Samantha Carter."

Daniel stank of sweat and gunpowder and the pungent leaves of the sage-like plants near the cache; Sam put her head next to his elbow on the thin coverlet and went to sleep.

*

 

When she woke up, it was just before dawn and the traffic noise from outside was filtering through the open window. Something had woken her, a smell--"Coffee!"

She rolled upright and followed the smell into the kitchen, where Daniel smiled and handed her a small bowl--Midian didn't do mugs. "Sleep okay?"

"Fine," she said, breathing deep of the scent coming off the bowl. They so rarely had coffee, because the Alpha Site's supply was finite and--weirdly enough--none of the Goa'uld had ever picked it up for transplanting offworld. Once these supplies were done, there would be no more, maybe ever. "You?"

He rolled his eyes over his own bowl, a lopsided one with uneven glaze that the Colonel had bought the first month they were here. "I dreamed of very short Jaffa, chasing me through a conference in the Chicago Marriott, out by O'Hare."

Sam choked, nearly spilling her coffee. Even without milk--how she missed milk--it was still far better than the over-sweetened infusion everyone on Midian drank in the morning. "Freudian?"

"No hidden meaning there, no," Daniel said, then leaned over to look at the door, which opened to reveal Teal'c and one of the ubiquitous net bags, this one full of greens and a paper parcel that might, Sam hoped, be meat. They needed protein.

There was indeed meat for breakfast: something smoky and rich, as close as they'd found here to bacon, some orange roots that were mashed with oil, and a crumbly bread flavored with rosemary. The greens had to be soaked in salty water for four hours, Teal'c said, before they could be eaten; Sam wasn't sure if this was purely culinary, or if they were poisonous otherwise.

After the dishes were done, Daniel went out to look for work--even here in the back of the galactic beyond, his translation skills were unusual--and Sam sat down with her journal. "How many of Keres' Jaffa were chasing you?" she asked Teal'c, and "How many packets of C-4 did we use on the space station?" and "Where did the Colonel say he was going first?"

"Two squadrons," Teal'c said, and "Three," and "He did not tell me; perhaps he told Daniel Jackson." He was remarkably patient, alternating between meditation and slow careful cleaning of the few weapons they kept here, basically just some knives, a few of the local pistols, and two zats. Everything else was too dangerous.

Sam napped again in the afternoon, and when she got up Teal'c was gone. She shrugged, poked at the greens soaking in their pot, ate a few scraps of smoked meat instead, and went back to her notes. When the door opened, finally, at sunset, she had poured herself a small glass of _instil'ha_ and was lounging on the bed, propped up against the wall.

"Look what followed me home," said Daniel, shouldering through the door. "Can I keep him?" He had the Colonel propped on his shoulder. Teal'c followed them, carrying the Colonel's pack and what looked like yet more groceries.

"Sir!" Sam scrambled to her feet. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, Carter," said O'Neill, shrugging away from Daniel and weaving towards the bed. When Sam took his arm to steady him, he scowled but let her support him as he eased down.

Teal'c went into the kitchen with the groceries; Daniel pulled a towel off the shelf as Sam took the Colonel's jacket off. It was clear O'Neill hadn't gone to the cache: he was wearing their standard field gear, an anonymous leather coat over soft green pants. He could be from any one of four dozen planets in this sector, which was the point. When Teal'c offered a cup of water, O'Neill took it with a sigh, and drank it down immediately.

He wasn't badly injured, from what Sam could tell, although he was favoring his left side. Daniel lifted the shirt to reveal bruises that spread from his hip-bone halfway to his armpit; O'Neill hissed as Daniel touched them. "Shit, Daniel, stop poking. It's just bruises."

"Fine, then," said Daniel, and sat back on his heels. "Now we're all here. Tell us what happened, Jack."

"Crap," said O'Neill, and looked up at the three of them. "We're gonna have to move the cache."

 

*

 

The day it happened was just another day for SG-1. Jack wondered about that later, like maybe he should have known. But he didn't. It was just another mundane trip offworld, if there were such a thing. No naquadah, no ancient ruins, no interesting technology--just half a dozen villages full of very nice people who had little to talk about other than the legends of their Potato God, as Jack referred to them.

Daniel insisted that Beavis wasn't a Potato God, but he was the god of freaking root crops--of course he was a Potato God. So they'd spent two days visiting in all the villages, eating way too many of these purple and orange potatoes, and now they could finally go home.

Jack wasn't even looking at the wormhole when he started transmitting. Wormholes were old hat. "SG-1-Niner to Stargate Command, this place is a bust. Is it Miller Time there?"

There was a silence, long enough that Carter turned around from where she was messing with the MALP. As she frowned, finally a voice replied.

"SG-1-Niner, you may--no! No, please, don't--" and then silence, not even static. The connection was dead.

Jack blinked. "Did you hear that?"

"It sounded like--like shouting, sir. In the background." Carter slotted the tool in her hand back into her pocket and picked up her P-90, turning around once in a slow circle. But wherever the trouble was, it wasn't here.

Jack drummed his fingers on his weapon for ten heartbeats, then nodded. "Okay, we're going by the book. If the SGC's been compromised, either they won't drop the iris or they'll have the gateroom under guard. And if we're _really_ unlucky, they'll have this address. Carter, dial me up a completely random planet nobody would expect us to go to. And then another, and another."

"If it's completely random, how can she know it's unexpected?" murmured Daniel, but subsided when Jack glared at him, and went to store his samples on the MALP.

Jack kept the wormhole open while Carter dug through her laptop for addresses, and Teal'c and Daniel stripped the MALP for survival gear and weapons, swapping out scientific equipment for spare cartridges. In ten minutes they were ready to move. It was sunny and pleasant here: a late afternoon on an early summer day. For all they knew, they'd be walking into a hailstorm or a hurricane or an earthquake.

But Jack suspected the storm was already underway, seventeen hundred lightyears away.

 

*

 

"Someone was there?" Daniel asked, crouching next to the Colonel. He shifted his weight, nearly toppled over, and caught himself with a hand on the edge of the bed. "Did they see you?"

O'Neill grimaced. "Maybe." He swallowed more water, scratched at his face--Sam moved his hand away so she could smear some antibiotic on it--and shrugged. "Six Jaffa, poking around that clearing half a klick south of the cache. Looked like they had some kind of scanner. They heard me, anyway."

"And?" asked Teal'c, who had moved to the window. From the market six floors below, Sam could hear the bells of tSukik the baker, announcing fresh bread was available.

"And I lost 'em," said the Colonel. "Took 'em up the ridge, doubled back through that pine grove, and beat them to the Gate. Went to Scooby and Daffy before I came here."

"You're sure," said Sam, dubiously. Scooby and Daffy were both uninhabited planets, with plenty of cover; but if the Jaffa had scanners--

O'Neill scowled at her. "I'm sure, Carter. They couldn't have followed me."

"But the cache may be compromised," said Teal'c.

"Hence my statement that we need to move it."

Daniel lifted his eyebrows, mouthing "hence". Sam bit back a grin.

"Well, let's get you something to--"

"There are Jaffa in the street," announced Teal'c urgently. "They are at the entrance to the building."

Sam felt the moment freeze, a nano-second of panic, and then she was on her feet, seizing her pack, throwing the Colonel's pack to Daniel, grabbing two water-canisters from the alcove. Their emergency exit--and of course they'd planned one, O'Neill had insisted--was through the bathroom. Weapon tucked into her robe, she leaped up to seize the pipe that supplied the water to their limited bathing facilities, swung once, and kicked open the shuttered window. The mottled green wood swung back with a muffled bang against the stucco outside wall, and Sam slithered out onto the tiny roof of the balcony on the sixth floor. From here it was a short two-meter leap to the roof of the building next door.

Sixty feet below, there was shouting and the unmistakable sound of a staff-blast. Midiani, anonymous in their tan-and-pale blue robes, were turning and pointing down the street. Someone screamed. Behind her, she heard the Colonel swearing at Teal'c, and Daniel yelled, "Jack, c'mon!"

Sam leaned back through the window: she could see, past Daniel in the bathroom doorway, O'Neill facing off with Teal'c, who had zats in each hand and no pack on his back. "Colonel, Teal'c! Let's go!"

"They know we are here, O'Neill! I will cover your six--you must go _now_!"

Daniel grabbed the Colonel's arm and yanked him into the bathroom. O'Neill spun around, wrenching himself out of Daniel's hold, and then stopped. Sam couldn't see his face from behind, but she could tell the moment where he accepted Teal'c's decision by the sudden drop in his shoulders. "Stay alive!" he snapped at Teal'c, and with an ease belying his age, he turned and came through the window.

Daniel followed; the three of them jumped to the next building and were on the far side of that roof when they heard the first staff-blast behind them. Sam didn't let herself hesitate but threw herself over the edge for the drop to the top of the merchants' hall with a voiceless prayer for Teal'c. They'd lost so much already.

 

*

 

"So?" Sam asked Daniel hours later as he entered the carrell in the scholars' section of the Great Library where they had gone to ground. In a city of over thirty thousand, without a technological signature to track--they'd ditched the zats just to be safe--Kokopelli's Jaffa had little chance of finding them. SG-1, on the other hand, had a good chance to track the Jaffa, who stood out in their armor and weaponry, and their arrogance.

Daniel tugged his hood off and hitched himself up on the edge of the counter: they were built to support the monstrous Midian codices, immense volumes bound between stone-hard boards of dense hardwood. He was sweating, although the night air was much cooler than it had been as they fled through the crowded evening streets. Sam had stolen a small lamp from the reference desk and was binding O'Neill's ribs by its light, using a long strip torn from the bottom of her inner robe.

"Rumor has it that the City Masters are meeting to take action before the end of the day," said Daniel, drinking heavily from the flask of water on the counter. "Not that there's much they can do." The City Masters were a cabal of aging traders and scholars, more used to setting tax policy and requiring mmala-drivers to diaper their animals than fighting off alien soldiers. Midian was the most powerful trade city on the planet, and hadn't been to war in several generations. O'Neill called them naive; Daniel called them civilized. Sam figured they were both right, and Teal'c had refused to comment.

"Where are they?" asked O'Neill, moving his shoulders to test the wrapping Sam had finished. "Did you see Teal'c?"

"They've got him," said Daniel, and Sam let herself sigh in relief. "Looks like they're operating out of that inn by the west bridge, the one with the purple shutters. I didn't get a close look, but he's definitely alive."

"So do we wait, or go after him right away?" Sam knew what she wanted, but Daniel was the one who'd seen the situation on the ground. Long past were the days when she didn't trust his analysis of the strategic situation.

The Colonel frowned. "We can't wait long. They're gonna question him."

They all knew what that meant: abuse rapidly escalating to torture. Teal'c was strong, but that didn't mean he couldn't be killed by Jaffa frustrated that SG-1 had slipped through their hands again. Sam drummed her fingers on the back of the bench, and then winced--her ragged nails caught and bent on the ironwood furniture, sending chills up her spine. "Move at noon?" she suggested. "Jaffa won't be expecting the heat..."

"Less risk of bystanders getting in the way," added Daniel; the streets were nearly empty at midday. "We can move fast without being slowed down."

"And risk sunstroke," grumbled O'Neill, but he nodded thoughtfully. He hadn't said a thing about the way Kokopelli's Jaffa must have followed him from the cache, and Sam certainly wasn't going to bring it up. "Yeah, that'll work. Depending on how many they've got on guard. Daniel," he said, tossing a piece of blue chalk on the counter, "show me the layout."

 

*

 

It wasn't like they didn't try. After two weeks with no response from anyone but the Alpha Site--where Redfield was keeping it together with remarkable aplomb, according to Teal'c--Jack and Carter went back to the MALP they'd abandoned on the Planet of Beavis the Potato God. Carter stripped it of everything valuable but the video camera, bit her lip, and dialed home. Nobody answered on the radio, even on the secondary frequencies. Silence: seventeen hundred lightyears of it.

At this point they didn't have much to lose, so Jack nodded, and Carter sent the MALP through the gate to Earth. Carter promised that not even the Goa'uld had figured out how to implement Caller ID on the gate system. But when the MALP signal died right away, at the moment it would have rematerialized, they shut down the gate and redialed immediately.

Jack didn't breath easily until they were at least six gatejumps away from there, and lost in crowds of holiday shoppers wearing green and yellow paint on their faces. Carter was saying something about the power system on the MALP, and the iris being down, maybe a computer malfunction: Jack ignored her.

Earth wasn't _gone_.

It couldn't be.

 

*

 

They couldn't afford to wait long, and not just because of the suspicious silence inside the hostel. As the day aged, the Jaffa out searching the city would give up and return; as it was, the half-dozen inside the building would be difficult enough to manage, with their limited arms.

Sam and Daniel were both armed with local weapons, small awkward revolvers that had to be reloaded manually after only four shots. The colonel, contrary to their standard protocol, had his P-90 with him, but tucked inside the robe Daniel had stolen from one of the other library carrells.

It was nearly noon, and blisteringly hot. The kind of hot Sam remembered from the Mid-East, the kind of hot that hit you on the head like a shovel when you walked out into it. She lifted her shoulder and wiped her sweaty face against the cloth of her robe, wishing for sunglasses. Or a baseball cap, anything.

She could feel Daniel and the Colonel behind her, clustered in the alleyway three doors down from the inn. The Westbridge itself was a four-story building built of the old grey-green brick common to the area, with purple awnings against the sun and a broad arcade on the first floor. It reminded her of Morocco, maybe, or Spain. Like it might even be cool inside, her bare feet padding on the smooth tiled floors.

"I don't think he's gonna do it," the Colonel whispered.

Daniel shifted his weight: Sam could picture the scowl on his face without needing to turn around. "We gave him every decin we had, Jack. He'll do it."

"Yeah, well, I just don't trust guys who do that thing."

"What thing, sir?" Sam asked, keeping her eyes on the open porch along the front wall of the inn. Nobody was moving there.

"That thing he does with his nose--"

tBekel came running down the street from the city center, sandals kicking up dust as he moved, the sound of his footsteps bouncing off the high walls along the Westbridgeway. "Lords! Lords!" he shouted, as he pounded to a stop in front of the inn. "Come quickly!"

A head shorter than Sam herself, tBekel looked like a street kid, his teeth flashing in the shadow of his hood; but in reality he was mature enough to hit on Sam and canny enough to scam O'Neill out of his breakfast three days in a row. After that, of course, the Colonel stopped playing any games with tBekel, no matter the provocation.

A Jaffa came to the door of the inn, and tBekel spoke with him urgently, pointing with a dark-brown hand up the road. When the Jaffa spoke, nearly invisible in the shadow of the doorway, tBekel shook his head. Sam figured this was the point where he explained that the dangerous strangers for whom the Jaffa were searching were trapped in an alleyway, but nobody was willing to go in after them. It was a risk: not _all_ Jaffa so arrogant they forgot the danger of underestimating the locals--but apparently this one was. Sam grinned as three Jaffa left the inn and went trotting down the road after tBekel.

"Let's go," she said. Five would have been better, but three was good. If Daniel's intel was right, that left three or four in the inn.

As agreed, she backtracked down the alley they were in and took a left at the end, circling around so she could come at the inn from behind. Daniel and the Colonel, on the other hand, headed right for the front door.

The heat was nearly debilitating; even out of the sun in the shadow behind the inn Sam could feel the sweat building inside her bra and running down between her shoulder-blades. She was pretty sure that if she stayed out in full sun for more than half an hour, she'd pass out from sunstroke. Thankfully, she realized as she looked up at the wall above her, she would only have to be exposed for a few minutes.

One of the eccentricities of life in Midian was that almost everyone sent their laundry out to be washed. It was a mark of basic civilization, like taking off your shoes inside the front door of a residence and not drinking from someone else's cup. In order to ease the burden of carrying dirty laundry around, most multi-unit residential buildings had a hatchway on each floor that opened onto a chute where you could deposit your linen bag full of sweat-stained underwear.

And the oldest buildings, such as the Westbridge Inn, had the chute bolted to the outside of the building. Sam rolled her shoulders, tied her sandals to her belt, and started up. It was relatively easy, as climbing went: working her way up a ninety-degree corner with regular ledges on one side and rusting but apparently sound bolts on the other. The sharp edges of the stone and metal dug into the soles of her feet, but she kept moving. About twenty feet up, she paused, considering, letting her weight rest on her feet while she leaned one shoulder against the outside wall of the inn. If someone was there when she came in through the third-floor window, that was going to be... embarrassing. Also possibly deadly.

She couldn't climb and hold onto her gun. But she did have more than a gun, after all. "The Colonel's never gonna let me hear the end of this," she muttered, drew her knife out from inside her robes, and bit down on the naked blade gingerly. "Ergh." If she was careful, she was pretty sure she wouldn't cut herself. Much.

Onward. Two body-lengths further, she was level with the third floor. The nearest window was about six feet away, to her left, and well out of reach from her relatively stable position in the corner. It took some tricky foot-placement, but she managed to cross the distance to the window and get her left hand onto the sill without either falling to her death or dropping the knife. Hoorah for small victories.

With a grunt and a wriggle, she heaved herself up, shouldering through the thankfully open window. The empty room was decorated in Late Industrial Commercial, with no homely touches beyond a pink bowl on the floor next to the bed, which Sam realized after a moment was a chamber pot. With a dubious sniff, she edged past the bed to the door, and eased it open gingerly. No sound; the Colonel and Daniel hadn't made their move yet, then.

Teal'c was a bit large to force up a flight of stairs if he resisted (which he would have), which was why Sam hadn't gone any higher before coming into the building. She figured he was probably being kept on the second floor, but it never hurt to be cautious. She slipped her sandals onto her feet and her knife safely back into its sheath. Then, stepping delicately, with her gun in her hand, she moved across the hall to the next room.

Locked, and from an ear to the door, empty.

As was the next.

The third held four sleeping Midiani, in a tumble of sheets and a glint of sweat-slick dark skin. Sam backed out very carefully. Something not to mention to the Colonel, although Daniel might find it interesting (it would explain why no one had commented on SG-1's odd living arrangements).

The fourth room was empty, and now Sam was at the stairs. If the second floor was like the third, she would come out of the stairwell, and there would be a bedroom door immediately to her left. That was likely where they were keeping Teal'c, if they had him on the second floor at all. Most inns were completely open on the first floor, with seating and small tables for the evening gatherings where family and friends ate spiced nuts and drank chilled teas or sweet wines; it was a major element of the social life of the city, here where it was too hot to gather outside during the day.

Sam was struck with a sudden desperate desire for a light beer and the view from the Colonel's back porch, of the tall pines on the edge of his yard and the glimpse of the Delgado's dying yard beyond them. _Fuck._

Over the last year-and-some, she'd learned to surf the waves of homesickness and rage, unable to bury them the way the Colonel and Daniel seemed to be able to. It would be March in Colorado now, the snow on the mountains slushy and the weather finally beginning to turn towards spring. She gave herself thirty seconds, blinked furiously, and then stepped cautiously into the stairwell.

It wasn't dark, lit as it was by the small windows set into the thick walls at six-foot intervals. The ironwood risers were smooth and rounded at the edges, slippery under Sam's sandaled feet. The inn's staff kept the place well: the landing was a little dusty, but otherwise clean.

Halfway down the second flight, Sam heard a gunshot from downstairs, and then a burst of a dozen more.

So much for silence: she bounded down the last ten steps and burst out into the hallway. As she turned to her left, she saw someone moving, someone who was not on her team: after six years she always knew. Still turning, she fired twice, and dove through the open door into the room.

A fast look revealed a room much the same as the others: sparsely furnished, with a bed, a side table, and a chair with a large black man tied to it. He was gagged and securely bound; Sam sliced through the gag first, before dropping to a crouch to deal with the rest of his restraints.

She realized suddenly that the P-90 was still firing below them. "They're taking their time," she muttered, yanking at the bindings. The ties the Jaffa had used were something she'd never seen before, and her knife was ineffectual. "Fuck," she said, and scrambled over to the door. The Jaffa she'd shot was lying in the hallway, blood pooled under his head: she'd taken him in the eye and the throat. There was something on his belt that looked like it might be the key for Teal'c's restraints.

"Major Carter!" shouted Teal'c, but not before the _other_ Jaffa, the one who'd retreated upstairs from the Colonel's P-90, got the drop on her.

 

*

 

"Ow," Sam said, and tried to touch her head.

Her hand was grabbed and forced back down, where it encountered something soft and smooth. Like cotton: cotton sheets, which she hadn't felt since... well, a long time, anyway. "Stop that, it won't heal if you keep picking at it."

"Daniel?" Her head hurt too much to open her eyes, but she didn't need them to recognize his voice.

"That's me. How're you feeling?" He sounded remarkably cheerful. Sam wasn't sure, but she suspected this meant they'd escaped.

She felt like a Jaffa had picked her up and swung her into a wall. Everything hurt. "What happened?" It smelled familiar here; not exactly homey, but comforting anyway.

"You rescued me," said Teal'c. "We then held off the rest of Kokopelli's Jaffa until the City Masters arrived. It was what I believe you would call a truce of Mexico."

"Ah, right," said Daniel. "Remind me later--"

"They kicked us out, Carter," said the Colonel, and that was enough of a surprise that Sam opened her eyes.

She wasn't in their rooms in Midian, or on a sleeping bag under the open sky, or in that traveler's hospice on M37 where the Colonel had gotten so sick from the fish soup. Instead the roof above her was the mottled white of a dropped ceiling, and the air she drew into her lungs was filled with the now-recognizable odors of antiseptics and cleaning supplies.

It smelled like _home_. In a moment, Janet would come bustling through, giving the Colonel an ironic eyebrow and even staring down Teal'c before checking Sam's pulse with warm professionalism. Colonel Reynolds would stick his head in the door to ask about Major Lorne's next physical, and josh with Daniel about the orientation schedule for new SGC personnel. There would be jello on the tray for lunch, and maybe Daniel would smuggle in Sam's laptop for her to run some models on.

"Carter? You okay?" Sam blinked, dropping her gaze to see the Colonel and Daniel next to the bed, Teal'c behind them, and behind _him_, sunlight through an open door.

"Oh," she said, after a moment, swallowing down the disappointment. "We're at the Alpha Site?" They'd agreed to go to the Alpha Site only in case of the most dire need; it was too dangerous.

The Colonel leaned over her, blocking her view of the doorway, where the light was the gold of late afternoon and not the unchanging cold light of the SGC. "They kicked us off the _planet_, Carter, and you were bleeding like a--well. A lot."

"Who? I mean, why?"

Daniel moved over to sit on the edge of the bed; it tilted and groaned, and he straightened quickly. "The City Masters. They told us we were an undesirable influence."

"Disruptive," clarified Teal'c, with a gleam in his eye.

"Ungrateful," groused the Colonel. "Those Jaffa--"

"Wouldn't have been there at all if it weren't for us, Jack," Daniel pointed out. "They followed _you_."

"Yeah, well--" said O'Neill, and then hesitated, shoving his hands into his pockets like there was a subject he was trying to avoid.

"How's my patient?" A black woman in her sixties entered from the inner doorway, wearing dull green BDUs with no patches. "Excuse me, Colonel," she said, and put her hand on Sam's wrist. "How are you feeling, Major?"

"I'm fine," said Sam, trying to sit up.

Doctor Boxdell, that was her name, Sam remembered now, shook her head and pressed Sam back against the pillows. "You have a mild concussion and two fractured ribs, Major. You're staying right there until I'm sure you have no other injuries."

"Food's better here, anyway," said the Colonel. "The rest of us are on the lentils-and-gristle diet."

"That's hardly fair, Jack..." said Daniel. "It's not like they have a lot of options."

Doctor Boxdell's look was caustic, as she finished checking Sam's bandages and pulled the blankets up again. "You try living for eighteen months on thirteen-hundred calories a day, Colonel. The Cimmerians do what they can, but it's going to be a hard winter."

There was an uncomfortable moment, punctuated by the expression on O'Neill's face, which was a mixture of embarrassment and resentment; he'd always hated being put in the wrong. It was covered by Teal'c, who nodded to Boxdell with his usual courtesy. "We will attempt to address that, Doctor. I believe that there is a great deal of game on PPS-435."

435\. Sam frowned, the headache still fogging her thoughts. 435 was...

"The planet with those purple flying things?" O'Neill was outraged. "They smelled like dogshit!"

"That was summer, O'Neill," said Teal'c. "In winter, the _pletz_ hibernate."

Sam smiled, shifted lower in the bed, and let her teammates' bickering fade as she drifted to sleep.

Daniel was sitting by her bed when Sam woke again, headache subsided to a dull ache. He was flipping through a file, pencil tapping absently on the paper. From what she could see of it at this angle, Sam identified it as the brief she'd prepared for Colonel Redfield sixteen months ago, with the Colonel's strategy bullet-pointed and backed up with her inventory of targets, refuges, and potential allies.

"So are you going to tell me what happened?"

Blinking, Daniel raised his head. It was night, maybe very late, given how quiet it was outside the infirmary. For once, Daniel was wearing his glasses, which he never did offworld anymore. It made him look reassuringly mundane, here in the safety of the infirmary. With the door closed, they could well be in the SGC, and not in a temporary building built from prefab parts brought through the gate from Earth.

"What happened when?" But his gaze slid away from hers.

"Daniel."

The folder made a surprisingly loud slap as he closed it and dropped it to the floor next to his chair. "Yeah." He bent his head and scratched the back of his neck, looking down. "Jack told you the City Masters kicked us out, right?"

"Right." There was a cup of water on the table next to her; flat but drinkable. When she was finished, Daniel took it back and poured some more from the small pitcher (green pottery: Sam was pretty sure they'd traded for that from the Cimmerians, back when they still had supplies Colonel Redfield was willing to expend).

Daniel turned the pencil over in his hand. "They kicked us out because when tBekel took the Jaffa down to the plaza, and we weren't where he said we were, he didn't get away fast enough."

Fast, smooth-tongued, inquisitive tBekel. Sam swallowed against a rush of bile. "Was he." She fumbled her cup, spilling a little water on the blanket; Daniel didn't notice. "So he's dead."

"Yeah. The City Masters took offense."

There was a clock somewhere in the room; Sam could hear it, but she couldn't see it. It ticked away for a long time, echoing against the linoleum floor and metal furnishings.

"Can't imagine why," she said, but there really wasn't any humor in it.

Daniel looked up, took the cup away, and wrapped his hand around hers. If he noticed the tears, he was kind enough not to say anything. The clock ticked some more. Sam breathed, taking on the weight. Adding tBekel to the list. To her list, anyway; she assumed Daniel and the Colonel had their own. He'd saved Teal'c's life at the cost of his own, and that meant something. Meant they couldn't just stop, meant they had to earn it all over again.

"So," Sam finally said, letting go of Daniel's hand. "I think we need to pay Kokopelli a little visit. That naquadah mine on 892 has pretty weak security..."

Daniel choked on a laugh. "892? Oh, Sam, that's just evil. You know how Jack feels about skirts."

END

 

_Jack's crows have a bad reputation  
Some of them are known as thieves  
They're involved in strange celebrations  
And magic on All Hallow's Eve_

Jack's crows Jack's crows  
Where everybody's from  
And nobody goes  
That's where you're gonna find Jack's crows

"Jack's Crows", by John Gorka


End file.
